1. Field
The disclosure relates generally to user communities and more specifically to discovering communities of users accessing resources via a network and discovering the expertise of those users by utilizing semantic analysis of access logs associated with the resources accessed by the users.
2. Description of the Related Art
Related bodies of work belong to one of the two directions. The first direction is social network analysis. Social network analysis has gained a lot of attention, especially with regard to recommender systems. Existing social network analysis approaches mine social networks to determine social communities of users based on explicit connections, such as, for example, “friends”, “followers”, and “circles”, or implicit communications, such as, for example, e-mail messages, instant messages, text messages, and small message system messages, made by the users. These social communities based on communications between users may contain both personal roles and professional roles. The second direction is role mining in computer security. Role analysis is the process of determining roles of these users and assigning to each user a permission associated with the particular role by utilizing role-to-permission mapping. Existing role analysis approaches apply various data mining techniques over the role-to-permission matrix to produce different sets of user groups. Each user in a particular user group exercises a similar set of permissions. These roles are however functional roles and are not based on semantic or logical roles.